Reconnecting

I’m off to the CIPD Festival of Work in London next week.

Photo by Shane Rounce on Unsplash

Now, given that the CIPD and I parted company at the end of April, you may be a little surprised to hear that. Well, whilst I no longer work at CIPD, I remain a member, as I have been for over 20 years now. Over those years, and alongside my member and Fellowship of the Learning and Performance Institute, I have worked in the public, private and charity sectors and developed my professional skills and forged many different professional and personal relationships.

So since leaving CIPD, I’ve been intentionally reconnecting with some of those people. I've been both surprised and pleased to have heard from, arranged to meet with and/or spoken with several individuals already. I’ve had a few voice calls, some Zoom/Teams online conversations and met some other folks for face to face ‘coffee catch-ups’, with more in the diary. (At this point, I could @List so many great people, but this isn’t a self-serving LinkedIn post and they know who they are anyway). Sufficient to say that each and every one of those conversations was different, authentic and nourishing. 

And now I’m looking forward to more of those and a full day’s learning and reconnecting at the Festival of Work next week.

I’ve been powerfully reminded about the value of connection - and the need for us all to develop and maintain our relationships. And it’s got me wondering: Who and what are my tribes? Who am I drawn to - and why? Who is drawn to me - and why? Why are we already connected, and who else should I be connecting to now?

Because this is not just about maintaining a ‘useful’ professional network, it’s about future-proofing my late career ‘active retirement’.

My active retirement will not be totally work-focussed. It will be fulfilling in so many different ways - I have some freelance work already in train, with capacity for more; I have more free time to reflect, write, continue learning to dance, dance more, walk more, travel, visit more heritage railways, spend more time with family and my pals, all while I still have the capacity and capability to do so.

I hope to see you along the way.

Living in the Grey

Life isn't binary. It isn't black and white. It's fractal. It's grey. It's ambiguous. It's messy. 

Yet we seem to be living in an age where everything is polarised, where choice is limited to extremes and where navigation through, amongst and between those opposites feels confusing and overwhelming.

But that's where most of us live, doing the best we can with the information and the resources that we have available to us, while being harangued, cajoled, bullied or, at best, encouraged to conform to one way of being or another.

Sometimes those imperatives are external, imposed on us, and sometimes they are internal, self-imposed. Much of the time, they seem to be at war with each other. And therein lies the cost we pay.

It may not be obvious or apparent at the time.  If you try to live by a set of values and beliefs, try to do the right things by and for everyone and everything for and to whom you feel a responsibility, when you 'push through', those costs get stored up and come home to roost later - in our physical and/or mental health, in our spiritual wellbeing and/or in our relationships.

Perhaps that's where the concept of a work/life balance originated. The idea that we could reconcile those conflicting demands for a fulfilling and meaningful means of earning enough to balance our own physical, spiritual and emotional needs against, and meet, the same needs of our dependent or obligated others. The hope that we can find equilibrium in the ambiguity between.

But it's something to which we tend only to pay lip service. The reality is that few of us think we have the choice to behave differently, to decline the divided path, but to travel lightly and bridge them, until it's too late, the damage is done.  And for some, there is no way back.

I have learned much in the last 14 months. I am not playing binary any more. Look for me in the  messy, grey spaces instead.